I think it would be useful to spend a little time identifying the
higher-level requirements surrounding MTOM and the like.
These are the ones I'm aware of:
1) Reduce "bytes on the wire", to improve bandwidth usage / transport
latency.
2) Reduce processing overhead during the generation and consumption of
messages.
3) Enable selective reordering in the serialization of message components,
to allow flexibility in processing.
The third deserves a bit more explanation; a use case might be placing a
large binary file after the SOAP envelope in the serialized message, so
that an intermediary (or ultimate receiver, for that matter) can act upon
the message before reading all of the bytes off the wire.
Are there any other high-level requirements associated with the abstract
MTOM feature? I think it would be nice to call these out in the document
at some point.
It would also be good to note that these can all be seen as encoding
issues and nothing more.
Cheers,
--
Mark Nottingham